Silence
by liesincrayon
Summary: 007/Q (As in Skyfall.) Q holds his breath and listens, and the panic is there now, rising, rising like waves, suffocating; yet still, all he can hear in all of this is just his own hyperventilating edging into madness. The city is silent. London is dead.
1. Chapter 1

There is never a morning when he does not wake up with clarity and precision and an immediate grasp on his surroundings and his sense of self, so the loss of awareness before this point, the lack of memory of shower, dressed, morning tea is alarming. Let alone how he got on the subway. He removes the earbuds and forces himself to breathe. He's dressed for work in the winter, which fits because yesterday had been first snowfall. He starts to count down the things he remembers.

Last night he'd had dinner with Eve and some of the girls from accounting. He'd done some coding before sleep, had read a few paragraphs of a thriller, and then- and then he is here on the tube. He glances at his reflection in the glass as the underground flies past, there is not blood on his face, his hair is carefully brushed. This doesn't feel right at all, he can't remember how he got here, but he looks like he obviously was put together enough to get here. A concussion doesn't seem likely, his head doesn't hurt and he doesn't seem to be in shock.

He knows the symptoms regrettably, and fitting none of them, he starts to focus on alternatives. A surreptitious test of his reflexes proves he can catch a pen, and also that he is likely not been drugged. He doesn't need to look around to know he's alone in the car, he'd already checked. He's running out of options for how he came to himself on a train and panic is an ebbing tide flickering at the edges of his consciousness, he tamps it down and pulls out his phone even though the tube plays merry hell with service. Five pm, the time, and he should have been in work at nine am, and it's Thursday at least, so at least he isn't missing any days.

The train stops at the station and the automated voice tells him the station and gives warnings and he steps off even though he's three off from the one he would need to go to work. What he needs now is a car to come around and a trip to medical. The gates are shut is what he notices first, second being that the station is empty. He stands very still, breathing even through his nose, then grasping the metal gate he shouts and shakes it and doesn't panic.

He stops, trailing off to silence because he's noticed something more important than anything that had come before, something terrifying, absolutely maddening.

On the quietest day, on a day of national observation, on the god damn prince's wedding even, the bustle of bureaucratic London is deafening. Cars, tourists, state workers, barkers advertising some overpriced sandwich, noise, cacophony, the sounds of life flow never ending as they have since the city's founding. Q holds his breath and listens, and the panic is there now, rising, rising like waves, suffocating; yet still, all he can hear in all of this is just his own hyperventilating edging into madness.

The city is silent. London is dead.

Q settles down with his back against the grating and holds his phone. He's close enough to freedom, metaphorical and literal what with the gate and the approximation to above ground. Wireless has full bars, he just has to. Has to what really, there is no sound and he's sure he hasn't gone deaf, for he can hear the train set off and the automated voice of the overhead, he can hear his own heart in his ears. There should be people out there, even if the city is in lock-down, and if it was he'd have been pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night by some agent and dragged to work to help put it to rights or go down with the maddening ship as it sunk.

He taps out a text crouched in on himself like a uni-student locked in the tube station and that only happened once and he wasn't nearly so terrified because of it. Eve's number is his last texted because drinks and dinner needed organization and she always wanted to know if he got home safe and sound like a good boy. She calls him boy only when she's annoyed with him, and he's sure that as long as she just responds to this message he won't mind that ever again. The text is comprised of nothing but the emergency access number and that holds all the instructions she needs. From there he calls his office and his throat clenches up when there is no answer of operator.

He isn't patient in most instances, just usually he has things to distract himself, to focus on for completion or people to play off that can shut down his internal nervous tension. He's literally helpless here though and he isn't at all okay with that. Locked in a tube station, and he'll have to find a way out if Eve doesn't respond. He's starting to convince himself he must be mistaken about the sounds, about the nothingness out there, he's just mixed up. There must be a logical explanation for all of this.

He waits fifteen minutes and there is no return text from Eve. So he brings up the radio app and fiddles with the controls until Cherry Ripe comes in. He isn't an agent, but well, this fits enough. He waits till the numbers circle around, counts digits, and thanks his memorization skills that he has a firm enough grasp on the algorithm to work out the new contact line from the jumble. He inputs the number and hovers over the call line. Eve still hasn't responded.

He hits call and holds the phone to his ear and underneath that bubbling horror frothing at him is the thought that M is going to be so righteously angry with him for using an agent call line to get himself out of a locked down subway station.


	2. Chapter 2

The ringer goes off and an automated voice responds unhappily that the caller is breaking the law by calling this number and it is being monitored. Q inputs his ID code and holds his breath. He jumps when the line clicks over. "Report." says a gruff voice and Q lets out a shuddering breath and bites down a thankful curse before spouting out his identification number. There is the sound of something, rustling, an edge of something familiar rises in him but is jarring and incongruent in some way that he can't identify.

"Quartermaster?" The voice asks in a hush of subdued pain, and oh, he'd be a happy man if he didn't immediately know that sound by heart. "007?" He requests and affirmation is given in coded form. "What are you doing in the emergency contact station?" Is the next thing Q asks. "No one picked up, I awoke in MI6 with a gunshot wound, so I came in person." There is so much wrong in that sentence and Q measures his breath to get through it. He doesn't ask the obvious, he already knows by the chain of events that MI6 must be empty too. "What the bloody hell is going on here Q?" Bond asks and Q wishes he had the answers to provide him.

Now that he knows he isn't completely alone he has the strength to push himself to stand, to take in his surrounding and the options provided to him. The gate is too firm, he'd never get through it, so he has to find another way then. He reports to 007, unnecessarily but needed, his own "waking" moment in the train. "You're locked in the tube? How quaint." 007 bites out and Q scowls at the door to the maintenance office, locked. If it had been 007 here he'd have kicked at the gate till it broke off the hinge or something equally heroic and masculine. Q preferred to open doors from miles away via protocol and commands. He kicks the door and bites down the yelp at the impact shudders up his shin. "Q?" It almost sounds worried, Q grits his teeth and kicks again.

This time the door gives on the top hinge and breathing steady he shoulders it open enough to slip through. "Had to open a door." Q responds and flicks on the light. There is a computer terminal and a ring of keys. Sitting down and booting on the system he settles for a bit, while freedom was the ultimate goal, he needed to know what he would be dealing with out there. It is a simple system, outdated and slow to boot, he listens to 007's breathing in the interim, and this is at least a little closer to their usual mission norm. "Where is the wound?" he asks slipping from the helped to the helper.

"Shoulder, the bleeding has stopped but it appeared fresh. I've bandaged it." Clinical report, detached as usual which also means the bandaging is probably sub-par and in need of further work if not a surgeon. "You didn't see anyone at all?" Q asks, finally able to get the system on the net, shutting down all but necessary processes in the action. "You already know I didn't." 007 snaps and Q can hear more sounds of shuffling over the line. "I'm coming to get you." Bond affirms. "Oh no, you are going to stay there." Q snaps, attacking the backdoor to the CCTV system he'd used in uni to get himself into all sorts of trouble. "Hell if I am, for the intel I have you are the only other operative of MI6 alive in London, and it is my responsibility as acting agent to make sure you stay that way." Which, it isn't really in bond's job description to protect anyone, he isn't a guard he's a spy and a trained killer, but things get consolidated down.

Q could order him to stay put, as acting superior and theoretically only remaining one he has the pull. The order gets caught in his throat as he shifts slowly through grainy video footage. All normal, lights shifting on streets with nothing but parked cars. Stations closed up and the movement the cameras pick up is in the flicker of flags in the wind, the refuse of modern society blowing down streets, chip bags like leaves. "Stay where you are, I've got to hang up now." 007 commands and Q merely makes a sound of affirmation, he can't bring himself to stand anyway.

The cameras pick up everything, his eyes and he throws the net out, uses the beat down system to pull in cameras from abroad. Train to France, Germany, the embassy in America eventually and there is no one. There is nothing in the world for him to see, no people teeming and lying. Violence, love, there is nothing but cameras and protocols left behind to protect them. He makes call upon call and the silence is deafening. He sits there searching desperate for inumerous minutes for when the silence is broken he nearly takes off his own hand with a metal shelf.

The sounds of destruction are ones usually playing accompaniment to any of 007's missions. Slipping back through the gap in the door he notes a motorcycle upended on the station platform. Flash and unnecessary are the first words to come to mind, when he could have just unlocked the gate with the keys hanging up on the wall in the room he'd just vacated. 007 is fixing his coat's set, but the look he gives Q is one of unusual emotion. Q can only imagine the open gaping look of absolute relief on his own face is pretty humiliating to witness.

There might have been a hypothetical mentioned once over drinks with Eve, that if James Bond was the last person left alongside you, would you do him, and while Q had exclaimed of course, this wasn't how he had wanted any such events to transpire. "While I appreciate the heroics, could you tone them down till we get your wound treated properly?" Q snaps levelly when he's caught his breath and forced a modicum of self control back into the situation. "You would criticize your own rescuer." 007 drawls.


End file.
